It took so much time and effort to get to this point. As I stood before the formerly grand but now quite weathered doors of the project manager’s office, I was more excited than nervous. With me was my Chinese research assistant, Yan (a pseudonym, as are all names in this article). Together we had achieved much success in interviewing Chinese managers of several other Chinese-funded projects in Uganda. I was feeling confident and slightly proud of myself because this day’s interview was particularly hard fought: we were on the cusp of sitting down with the highest-ranking official in Uganda for the Chinese state-owned enterprise Sinohydro. This firm had designed and nearly finished constructing the largest and most complex infrastructure project in Uganda’s history. With a 1.5-billion USD loan from the Export–Import Bank of China, Uganda was accomplishing the long-held goal of building a huge hydroelectric power plant on the Nile River.

A Challenging Interview

I had first visited the small village of Karuma, where the dam was being constructed, years before. In several early visits, I spoke with many workers and community members but had no success getting through the main gates of the construction site. From brief and intimidating chats with the gruff, heavily armed military personnel providing security, it was clear that access would require approval from very high-level Ugandan officials. So began my many pilgrimages to the office of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Energy in the capital, Kampala. After months of pleading and assurances that I had received official research clearance from the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, the Permanent Secretary gave me her blessing and handed me off to the Ugandan official who had overseen the Karuma Hydropower Project since its inception. Mr Bosco was impressive and intimidating: built like a prize fighter, very sharp, somewhat standoffish, and clearly extremely busy. He was nonetheless generous, speaking with me at length about the project and agreeing to arrange my access to the site and, most crucially, to Sinohydro management. I was in—or so I thought.

As Mr Ling, the Sinohydro project manager, ushered me and my research assistant into his office that day, I sensed things might not go as I hoped. We made our way to the worn couches, and I was expecting the warm greeting I had received from Chinese managers I interviewed at other sites. Instead, Mr Ling essentially ignored me and focused his attention on Yan, peppering her with rapid-fire questions in Chinese about me. ‘Who does he really work for? What does he really want?’ he asked. Repeated reassurances from Yan that I was indeed just an academic writing a book about China–Uganda relations and that I had approval from the Ugandan Government did little to assure him. He continued addressing Yan, saying: ‘The China and US relationship now is not very good. The US media has been too critical of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and that has had a bad impact. The Ugandan media, too, causes problems.’ Eventually, he turned to me and said in rough but passable English:

I don’t usually accept this kind of interview. All the information you want, you need to get it from the Ministry of Energy. The only thing I can tell you is the first turbine started last month. Any other information I cannot tell you.

I was admittedly knocked a little off balance by this reception. I also felt a creeping sense of dread that my one chance to get Sinohydro’s official position on the Karuma Dam was slipping through my fingers.

Yan was also unnerved, and we both did our best to appear friendly and sympathetic, trying hard to keep the conversation going. The interview remained challenging throughout, and Mr Ling never really dropped his guarded and defensive posture. After 40 minutes that felt both lamentably short and agonisingly long, Mr Ling made it clear our interview was over. As he stood, I asked whether we could take a photo together—a request enthusiastically received by all the other Chinese managers I had interviewed. He gave a curt: ‘No.’ I asked whether he could help us interview other Sinohydro management staff at Karuma and he replied equally curtly: ‘They are all too busy now.’ In a final attempt to get something more, I asked whether he could arrange a tour of the dam. He paused and said: ‘You need to speak with your Ugandan Ministry of Energy contacts for that.’ Moments later, Yan and I were back in the hallway, left to process what had just happened and what it meant for our research at Karuma.

That evening as I sat down to write my daily fieldnotes, my initial shock about the interview had morphed into anger. Looking back on my notes, I clearly used them to vent. I wrote:

[Mr Ling] really embodied all the things Ugandans dislike about the Chinese. He was arrogant, condescending, rude, guarded, suspicious to the point of paranoid, aggressive. And most importantly he felt he didn’t need to tell me anything even though I had the Ministry of Energy as my liaison.

My opinion of Mr Ling soured further as I tried again to interview other Sinohydro managers. I returned to Mr Bosco at the Ministry of Energy, and he personally called Mr Ling to ask for help to arrange more interviews. Mr Ling said no. When I later learned that the Sinohdyro chief financial officer was at Karuma, I asked Mr Bosco to call him to help set up an interview. Mr Bosco obliged me, and I listened in on speakerphone as this manager politely but firmly declined the invitation, saying Mr Ling did not give his blessing. At this point, in my mind, Mr Ling had come to represent all the problems the project had encountered over many years. Many were already well publicised in the media, such as the long construction delays and quality issues including significant cracks in the dam. Others I had learned about in my interviews with workers and community members, many of whom complained about problematic labour practices and the neglect of social problems in Karuma village, from overcrowded schools to poor sanitation and even children abandoned by their Chinese worker fathers.

Upon Further Reflection

With some distance from this interview, however, my attitude about Mr Ling and Sinohydro more generally began to shift. When I went back to analyse my interview, I noted Mr Ling’s defensive posture but was surprised by just how much information he had in fact shared. He let me ask nearly all my questions and he provided at times frank answers. He also opened up somewhat when asked about his personal life and the challenges of being away from his family back in China. Perhaps most significantly, a more sympathetic reading of the interview allowed me to see just what a difficult position Mr Ling was in. The dam construction timeline had doubled from five to 10 years and he had been brought in to get the dam completed and operational. This was indeed a stressful position, with the Ugandan Government, Chinese Government, and the media all closely scrutinising what he was accomplishing. The dam and, by extension, Sinohdyro had become easy scapegoats for all the complaints and concerns Ugandans had about evolving Uganda–China relations. Mr Bosco had told me as much, stressing that Mr Ling was ‘in a very difficult position’. And now an American had appeared at his door with connections to the Ministry of Energy, asking all sorts of difficult questions.

While I wish he had done more to provide access to other Sinohydro managers, I came to realise that Mr Ling had become an easy scapegoat for me as well, embodying all my frustrations about gaining access to Chinese elites—a common issue at all four of my field sites in Uganda. My frustrations were compounded, I realise, by my own subject position as a white, American, middleclass, highly educated man. In addition, I like to think of myself as a seasoned Ugandan specialist, having conducted ethnographic research in the country for more than 20 years. While I had encountered challenges gaining access to informants on previous projects, they were all overcome quite easily in retrospect, bolstering my sense of privilege in terms of the level of access I came to expect.

It was quite a shock for me, then, when Mr Ling made clear the limits of my privilege when gaining access to Chinese elites. Although the initial barrier to access had been overcome, my own frustrations over access continued to shape how I interpreted Mr Ling and, by extension, Sinohydro. I focused on the negative by and large, interpreting the interview as a confirmation of all the problems and complaints Ugandans had expressed to me about the project. What was lost was a fuller picture of the pressures and constraints faced by Mr Ling and a sense of his humanity as a managerial cog in a complex transnational machine. I also missed how Mr Ling’s experiences reflected those of Sinohydro more generally. It was, after all, a state-owned firm tasked with a truly challenging infrastructure project that was caught between the watchful eyes of the Chinese State, the Ugandan State, and the Ugandan people. Like Mr Ling, the firm was indeed an easy scapegoat for all the inevitable problems produced by a megaproject such as the Karuma Hydropower Project.

The Recurring Theme of Access

The challenges of access to Chinese informants are a central theme in Global China research. One prominent example is from Ching Kwan Lee’s 2017 book, The Specter of Global China, which compares Chinese and other foreign firms in Zambia’s mining and construction sectors. Her methodological appendix focuses largely on the precarity of her access to the entire spectrum of elites—Chinese, Zambian, European, Indian—noting that ‘gaining access to Chinese state and global capitals was the biggest challenge for this ethnographic project’ (Lee 2017: 25). This was especially the case for mining, including the Chinese state-owned conglomerate running the Chinese copper mine. She describes the ‘stern monologue’ she received from the mine’s Chinese general manager who was wary of her as a Hong Kong native and American academic (Lee 2017: 175). He also took issue with an article on the mine Lee had published that focused on workers’ perspectives and she concluded she had essentially ‘failed my job interview’ (Lee 2017: 175). However, a chance encounter with a Zambian politician who would become the country’s vice-president led to a friendship that ‘was absolutely instrumental in helping me overcome the most critical hurdle: research access to the mines’ (Lee 2017: 175). Yet, when the vice-president’s party later lost power, ‘so went my access to the power elite’ (Lee 2017: 185), underscoring the precarity of access in Global China fieldwork.

Such reflections on access do gesture towards the importance of positionality in research. However, often the discussion of how one’s background and biases matter ends once access has been granted. In this sense, a robust reflexivity where the researcher continually critically engages with how one’s positionality shapes the entire research process remains rarer (Robertson 2002; Smith 1989). One key facet of this, I argue, is thinking more about how issues regarding access linger long after they have been overcome and, thus, continue to shape how researchers interpret the impact of Global China projects in various contexts. This can be understood as one facet of what Franceschini and Loubere (2022) advocate in Global China as Method. As they argue, there is a problematic tendency to view China as ‘a fundamentally different “Other” that somehow exists apart from the “real” world’ (Franceschini and Loubere 2022: 1). Instead, we should see that Global China is ‘the result of complex dynamics and interlinkages’ and part of ‘the co-construction of “China” as an imagined entity’ (Franceschini and Loubere 2022: 7). As my example from the Karuma Hydropower Project illustrates, frustrations over access led to what I now see were overly critical assessments of Chinese elites such as Mr Ling and the state-owned enterprise he represented. However, I have also experienced the opposite—namely, times when the way access was granted made me more sympathetic to individuals and their work.

A Scolding Then Gracious Welcome

If you travel 400 kilometres south of Karuma, you reach the northern shores of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile River. Here thousands of hectares of dense scrub have been transformed into Uganda’s largest rice farm. Vast paddies stretch across the flat terrain beyond the horizon. Dotted throughout are hundreds of Ugandans, many bent over at the waist, weeding and cultivating bright-green rice plants under the intense equatorial sun. It is an impressive site, and all accomplished by a single private Chinese investor who purchased the land and developed the Lukaya Rice Farm.

This was the last field site I visited for my research, so I was prepared to face challenges gaining access to the farm. I was, however, still taken aback by the greeting my Ugandan research assistants and I received when we made our first visit. We were met by the Ugandan head manager, a tall, thirty-something man with a trendy full afro that was unusual in Uganda. He barely let us introduce ourselves before he began berating us for just showing up and not following ‘proper protocol’ by calling him first. Our scolding continued for several minutes and then we were ushered away from the farm. Given the manager was also the farm’s official community liaison, this initial encounter made all of us quite concerned about how the project was being managed.

I was nonetheless undeterred and decided it was best to seek out the Chinese owner himself. Mr Feng had come to Uganda 20 years earlier and slowly built a business empire that included plastics manufacturing and real estate. He was one of the most powerful Chinese businessmen in Uganda and the farm was his ambitious foray into agriculture. Yet, he kept a low profile. After much sleuthing, I found his main office in a nondescript office block in Kampala. I arrived at the office with a formal letter on my university letterhead requesting permission to interview him and visit his farm. I was greeted by Mr Feng’s assistant, a middle-aged Chinese man who spoke limited English. After reading my letter, he made a call and then told me to follow him in his car. We sped across town to a midrange Chinese hotel with a large restaurant. Waiting out front was Mr Feng, waving to greet me. He ushered me to a private eating area, summoned the waiter, and ordered us an elaborate lunch. Given the reception we received from the Ugandan manager at the farm, this warm welcome by Mr Feng was a pleasant surprise and rather disorienting. Yet, I also felt smugly proud of myself, thinking that this was more like the reception I deserved.

We sat together eating and drinking tea for nearly two hours. Mr Feng made clear he understood my intentions and said a well-researched book on China–Uganda relations was very important. He repeatedly said he would happily provide any information about the farm, and I could visit any time. He framed his farm as not a business venture but a model of agricultural development that Ugandans themselves could emulate. When I explained the other projects I was researching, he provided fascinating and largely critical assessments of them, saying he knew those Chinese people well and Uganda’s development was not their priority. Mr Feng also made sure I knew he had a charitable foundation, sharing a video that profiled a Ugandan girl who received funding for her school fees. He said this was just one way he was focused on helping women and girls in Uganda.

Graciousness Reconsidered

My initial assessment of the project was, not surprisingly, shaped by my lunch with Mr Feng. After extensive tours of the farm, dozens of interviews with workers, managers, and community members, my impressions were quite favourable. The business model was a streamlined, no-frills operation designed to keep costs low so that other individual investors could replicate the project elsewhere in Uganda. The farm was also providing steady jobs, employing hundreds of Ugandans, many of whom had little education and had travelled from distant parts of the country to find work in the rice fields.

Yet, as time passed, I began to reassess my initial rosy opinion. My Ugandan research assistants prompted me to think more critically about the kind of jobs this farm was producing and who really benefited. The wages were in fact some of the lowest we had encountered at the four field sites. While the farm had been operational for several years, Mr Feng claimed it had yet to turn a profit and thus wages had not increased since the start of the operation. Yes, women were employed but their job prospects were generally more limited in Uganda, making them less deterred by low wages. The work itself was very physically demanding: repetitive manual labour in the fields with no protection from the sun and exposure to toxic fertilisers and pesticides. My research assistants were also taken back by the onsite living conditions. The dormitories were dank repurposed shipping containers crammed with bunk beds. The bathrooms were filthy latrines that you could smell from metres away. In addition, I had interviewed Mr Feng by myself, so my research assistants did not get to experience his cordiality. They were still stinging from their interactions with the Ugandan farm manager, whom they found exceedingly condescending and disrespectful, especially as a fellow Ugandan. Overall, my research assistants made me reconsider whether this farm should indeed be viewed as a model for agricultural development for Uganda.

Reflexivity as Recursive

As I write this reflection on my fieldwork, I realise I am still working to disentangle my frustrations, and occasional victories, gaining access from my overall appraisals of these Chinese-Ugandan projects. These challenges come in part from how my identity as a privileged white, American, male academic shaped what my respondents revealed to me. But equally significant is how my own expectations of the access I felt I deserved shaped my interpretations of these projects. The access challenges common in Global China research, I argue, are thus deeply intertwined with issues of reflexivity. They have important implications for how we interpret this complex social field well after access has been permitted. This makes critical reflection on one’s own positionality more complex and reflexive Global China research all the more essential.